Thursday, August 16, 2012

"27: Six Friends, One Year" by R J Heald

Ruth has just published her first novel, “27: Six
Friends, One Year.” It was the first book I downloaded onto my new kindle and I’m
looking forward to settling down with it. In the meantime, Ruth has come to Tea
Stains again to talk about her book.

Welcome
Ruth. Tell us a bit about your book.

"27: Six Friends, One Year" book was a
quarter-finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award in 2012, I was a winner
of the Next Big Author Competition in September 2011 and I was shortlisted for
the Brit Writers Awards in 2010.

Your 27th year is a turning point.

Kurt Cobain. Amy Winehouse. Janis Joplin.

They died at 27.

Six friends reunite in London. From the outside
their lives are enviable; from the new father, to the rich entrepreneur to the
carefree traveller. But underneath their facades they are starting to unravel.
Dave is made redundant, Renee’s marriage is crumbling and Katie is forced to
return home to her parents after six years abroad. In a world fuelled by social
media and ravaged by recession, the friends must face up to the choices they
must make to lead the lives they truly want to live.

So, your
novel 27 is about a year in the life of six friends ages 27. Is it based on
your own life and your own friends?

Yes and no. I wanted to write a book that featured
ordinary people leading ordinary lives in modern day London. So some of the
situations the people find themselves in are very real, and will be real to a
lot of the people reading: redundancy, the breakdown of a relationship, getting
married. However, although the situations may have happened to my friends and
I, no character is based on anyone in particular. Instead, the characters are a
mash-up of everyone I know. So no-one I know is exactly like Dave, but he might
be a combination of 6 or 7 of my friends.

Six
friends, one year is an interesting concept. What made you think of it?

As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to write about the
drama of ordinary lives. But the nature of life isn’t linear like a story; it
ebbs and flows and everyone changes at the same time. Although we all like to
believe we are the central character in the world, the most interesting thing
about us is the relationships with have with the people around us.

By taking a year in the characters’ lives I was
able to capture the complexity of everyday life within a structure, whilst
telling each character’s story. But I also wanted to capture that sense of
continuity; the characters lived before the book began and they will continue
to live afterwards.

Some readers have compared the book to One Day by
David Nicholls and I think that’s a good comparison. His story is also
time-defined; revisiting the characters on the same day every year. And in his
story you also get the sense of continuity, that regardless of painful events,
life goes on.

Who’s
your favourite character in 27?

When I’ve collected feedback on 27, most people say
their favourite character is Katie. I think she is the least selfish of the
characters and is therefore the most likeable. It’s hard for me to choose my
favourite, but I think in real life I’d probably be friends with all of them,
and like the others, I’d be jealous of all the success that has come to James.
He seems to have it all, but underneath the surface he is battling real demons.

Some
authors plan, others just write. How do you write?

That’s an interesting question. When I wrote my
first (unpublished) novel, I planned meticulously. I had a colour-coded Excel
spreadsheet that listed out what happened in every single chapter. I started
writing and I stuck religiously to my structure. It took me a year to write and
I’m still editing it now! I think part way through I started to lose some of
the enjoyment of writing and the structure limited my creativity. However,
without the structure I’m not sure if I’d have got to the end at all.

When I wrote 27, I really did just write it for
fun. I just had a vague idea to write a year in the lives of ordinary people
and I didn’t plan at all. I just wrote the most poignant scenes that came into
my head; the everyday dramas of ordinary lives. Then I started to structure a
story about them and the inter-relationships between the characters. I enjoyed
every moment of writing the book.

Some people say there’s a right way and a wrong way
to write a book, but I really don’t think that’s true. You have to write in the
way that feels most comfortable to you.

Some
authors say that after a while their characters start to come alive on the page
and have ideas of their own about the plot. Did that happen to you?

Yes, I think it did. When I started writing the
book, I had no idea where it was going. After a while the characters started to
have minds of their own and they drove the plot more than I did. Sometimes I
had an idea where I was going to take the story, but the characters just
wouldn’t allow it. They wanted to do something else. For instance, one of the
characters wanted to sleep with someone completely unsuitable... By the end all
the characters had really clear voices, and I had to go back and change some of
the storylines at the beginning because I realised they just wouldn’t have
behaved like that.

How
long did it take you to write 27?

Actually, it didn’t take me very long to write the
first draft at all – only about a month. But the editing has been a real
killer. That took eighteen months. I kept taking the book to beta readers
thinking it was finished and I just kept getting more and more feedback. So I
kept rewriting. After I finished writing the first draft, it took me another 18
months to get the book to a place where I was happy with it.

What
did you think of the writing scene in Bangkok?

I was pleasantly surprised when I came to Bangkok
and I realised how big the English language literary scheme was. I had imagined
being isolated in my apartment with my computer writing away, but the support
network in Bangkok was brilliant. There’s a huge expat community. While I was
there I met many, many writers and belonged to two excellent writers’ groups:
The Bangkok Women’s Writers Group and the Bangkok Writer’s Guild. There’s also
the lovely Neilson Hayes Library, a colonial-style building which houses many
English language books. I was lucky to be asked to speak at the library last year
at the Bangkok Literary Festival, alongside Stephen Leather and Christopher G.
Moore.

What
inspires you to write?

People. I love people-watching; observing the
subtleties in relationships. You can overhear so much if you just listen:
arguments on the tube, groups of friends in a bar gradually getting louder and
louder, couples maintaining polite small-talk in a restaurant. Conversation is
about so much more than the words; it’s about the things that aren’t said as
well. If you watch and listen for only a very short time, you can start
to see signs of the undercurrents beneath the surface. 27 is about those
undercurrents: the differences between the public face people present to the
world and the reality behind it.

I’m planning a sequel to 27, set a few years later.
I want to meet the characters again when the dust has settled and see where
they are and whether they have found happiness. I’m pretty sure things won’t be
quite as they imagined and there will be the usual ups and downs of life. I
have lots of ideas for that, but I haven’t started writing yet.

I have another two novels currently on the back
burner – one is a story of a doctor-patient relationship. That’s the one I’ve
already written that one and it’s locked away awaiting further editing. Another
is about an expat couple in 90s Bangkok. I’m about a quarter of the way through
the first draft of that one. I actually have too many projects – it’s hard to
decide which ones to pursue first!

Thanks to Ruth for joining me here. You can find "27:
Six Friends, One Year" at Amazon UK here and at Amazon US here.

About Me

I moved with my family to Bangkok in July 2005. What do I do? I make hats and costumes; I’ve written articles, a novel and a non-fiction book is underway… I've held a variety of volunteer positions within the expat community.
Tea stains is where I write and illustrate the things that consume me: life in Thailand, shop windows, books, cats, making, hats, fascinators, tea and the colour orange.